Another Thing to Fall (33 page)

“And that’s when she became Flip’s assistant,” Tess said, still trying to work out the timeline.

“No, that was a few weeks later, after Alicia was fired for letting go of the pilot script. Remember, Greer was an unpaid intern at first, going through boxes of crap, same as Lloyd is doing now. God knows what
he’ll
find on me, given enough time. When she came back for the second favor, I saw I was never going to be free of her.”

“So
you
killed her,” Mr. Sybert said.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I wasn’t even there that night.” Ben’s confusion was genuine, but Tess realized that Mr. Sybert was sophisticated enough to realize that a defense attorney could offer conflicting theories if he were tried in Greer’s death — the boyfriend did it, the blackmailed writer did it. But Mr. Sybert was still going to have to explain how Alicia had ended up dead at his feet.

“This is about money,” she said. “Plain and simple. Mr. Grace’s idea was used, and he was entitled to payment. Mr. Sybert, as his heir—”

“Well, my wife, Marie, is his heir, but she’s helpless about money matters,” he said. The warm, wry affection inspired by his wife was so normal, so endearing that Tess almost forgot the gun in his hand, the one, maybe two people he had killed.

“What if we paid you a half million and gave your brother-in-law a created-by credit?”

“No fucking way,” Ben fumed, but Tess could tell he was playing along now, that he realized he shouldn’t cave too easily. “I could have optioned the last three Pulitzer Prize winners for that kind of money. And I’ve got the created-by credit on this. You’re taking money out of my pocket.”

“Well,” Tess said, “that’s how damages work. Someone has been hurt. Someone has to make up for that. And I know from the background checks that I performed on the production that you have that much cash in your Fidelity account alone. You could probably run up to the local branch right now and get a cashier’s check in that amount. I’ll stay here, for insurance as they say.”

“It’s almost five now,” Mr. Sybert objected, “and he’d never make it in time, not in rush hour.”

“Not even if he took Northern Parkway to Perring, then took that back way over to Providence Road?”

“Oh, I know a better shortcut than that,” Mr. Sybert said.

“No way. How would you go?”

And that was all it took, the Achilles’ heel of the born, bread-and-buttered Baltimorean, his — or her — certainty of the city’s geography, the parochial pride in knowing the best shortcuts. Mr. Sybert put his gun down on the coffee table, ready to show Tess on the back of one of Alicia’s magazines how to drive to Towson in rush hour — and she head-butted him, threw herself into his soft, round stomach so hard that she tipped over the chair in which he was sitting.

There was much thrashing of limbs and grunting on both their parts, more than Tess had anticipated. He was stronger than he looked, but then — he would have to be. After all, she was now certain that he had beaten a woman to death, which required considerable stamina and commitment. All Tess could do was hope that Ben Marcus had seen enough goddamn movies to realize he should grab the gun left on the table.

In fact, Ben had the posture down — legs braced, if a little quivery, both hands holding the gun. Yes, he had the posture down, but not, thank God, the patter. In fact, Ben didn’t utter a single syllable in the endless two minutes it took for Tess to retrieve her own gun and call 911.

Not that Mr. Sybert was fighting anymore, either. He sat placidly on the floor, reading and rereading his brother-in-law’s letter. He wasn’t smiling — he wasn’t so crazy that he couldn’t realize how much trouble he was in — but the letter clearly brought him some comfort. He had proof, and someone had finally listened to him. On some level, he believed himself vindicated.

“He was really so very clever,” he said when the sirens began echoing down Walther Avenue. “My brother-in-law, I mean. Bob. He could have made a beautiful movie, as good as anything you’d see in Hollywood, if only someone had given him a chance.”

“I suppose,” Tess said, as kindly as she could to a man who had killed two women, “that it really does come down to who you know.”

Ben opened his mouth, as if to contradict her, then stopped. His instincts were good. If he had said something argumentative or tried a bit of snappy banter just now, Tess might have pistol-whipped him, too.

The
Mann of Steel
premiere — really, more a onetime showing for the Baltimore-based crew and their families, as the real premiere was to be in Los Angeles two days later — was held at the Senator Theater. The grand old movie house had screened many of Baltimore’s homegrown projects and had its own Grauman-style sidewalk devoted to the various productions. The squares didn’t come cheap, and Tess knew that Lottie had wanted to forgo the tradition. But Flip was keen to have one, even if it did end up in what Ben called the “Tumulty ghetto,” just beyond the area devoted to his father’s work.

There was even a red carpet of sorts, although no real stars to walk it. Selene Waites was in Prague, working on an independent film, while Johnny Tampa refused to attend when the production — Lottie again — balked at sending him
four
first-class tickets — one for him, one for his mother, one for the newly minted Mrs. Tampa, and one for
her
mother. Lottie was willing to go as high as three but drew the line at Tampa’s mother-in-law. The new Mrs. Tampa, a former Miss Hawaiian Tropic Tan, had been met and married in a whirlwind courtship over the Christmas holidays. But the courtship was not so heady, according to gossip, that Johnny had neglected a prenup.

Good old Johnny,
Tess thought, studying one of the posters outside the theater, where Johnny had been given the benefit of a much tighter jawline than he had in real life.
He thinks everything through
.

A local television reporter tried to catch Tess’s eye when she stopped, but she managed to get inside before he could approach her. She and Ben had agreed not to talk publicly about what happened in Alicia Farmer’s house, and George Sybert was remaining silent as well. As far as the public knew, a city man had killed a city woman in some sort of personal dispute, then agreed to a plea bargain that the beleaguered state’s attorney’s office was happy to make. Some details couldn’t be kept back — George Sybert’s name, the fact that he had been fired from the school district a few months earlier and was increasingly desperate to provide for his invalid wife — but those facts only confused the situation more. A deal had been struck, and there would be no jailhouse interviews about stolen scenarios and
The Duchess of Windsor Hills,
no accusations of plagiarism.

And no charge against Sybert for the murder of Greer Sadowski. That one remained on JJ Meyerhoff ’s scorecard. Sybert could not be shaken in his story: He went to the office that night to confront Greer, and she was already dead. Yes, he was the one who had opened drawers, but he hadn’t taken her ring, didn’t even remember seeing a ring. Tess had been scouring pawnshops and less-than-meticulous antique dealers all fall and into the winter, looking for the simple pear-shaped diamond she remembered, but nothing had shown up. She had even asked Marie Sybert if she had received the gift of a ring last fall, but the poor woman had denied it, and Tess didn’t have the heart to press her. Marie Sybert had enough worries, with her brother dead and her husband in prison.

Tess understood the police indifference to breaking Sybert’s story down. There was no percentage in letting citizens know that they had killed the wrong suspect while the real killer had remained at large, only to kill again. She understood — the first rule of bureaucracy is “Cover your ass,” as her father might say — but she didn’t have to like it. The only consolation was that the decision had been made far above Tull’s head, and she believed that this particular closed case would remain forever open to the conscientious detective. If he got a chance to clear Meyerhoff, he would. Would a ring in a pawnshop prove anything? Only if someone at the store could swear that it was Sybert who had brought it in. Even then, that might not be enough. She was chasing her own MacGuffin, but it seemed more productive than trying to persuade Sybert to confess. Still, she kept visiting him, in hopes he might come clean.

“I wish you had killed me that night,” George Sybert said the last time that Tess saw him, a week before Christmas. “My life insurance would have been sufficient to take care of Marie.”

“Are you sure?” Tess asked.

“Oh yes, I know all the ins and outs of my policies.”

“No, I mean — are you sure that you’d like to be dead?”

“Marie would be better off.”

“Does Marie think so?”

His eyes moistened, and Tess had to remind herself that this disarmingly devoted husband had killed two women. The problem with George Sybert — the problem with most of humankind — was that the only pain that mattered to him was his own. He mourned his brother-in-law and best friend. He would go to any lengths to take care of his Marie. But what about Greer? What about Alicia? Neither one deserved to be dead.

Boy meets girl
. Bob Grace gets to Alicia, then Greer gets to him, promising him the document he thinks will prove everything.
Boy loses girl
. Greer recants, and Bob Grace, despairing of seeing his dream realized, kills himself. His brother-in-law takes over his quest.
Boy gets girl
. George Sybert kills Greer, then Alicia.

“Popcorn?” Crow asked.

“Of course,” Tess said.

Tess, Crow, and Lloyd had been given reserved seats, far better than Lloyd’s status would normally confer, just two rows behind the producers. Ben motioned Tess to join him in the aisle.

“Can you keep a secret?” Ben asked.

“I would think that my track record speaks for itself.”

The old Ben might have had a comeback for that. The new one said:

“We’re getting a pickup, even before the first episode airs. It’s not exactly the vote of confidence it seems — they just don’t have enough in the production pipeline, so they’re using the pickup to create heat for the show. You know —
a show so good we didn’t even wait for ratings
. That kind of crap. But they were really excited by the reaction at T.C.A.”

“T.C.A.?”

“The television critics. They meet twice a year, preview stuff. We got great buzz.”

“Congratulations. So
Mann of Steel
returns to Baltimore. I’ll try to keep the glorious news to myself.”

Ben glanced over his shoulder to see who was nearby. “That’s the thing — we’re not coming back here. The network gave us an early pickup, in part, so we could figure out a way to work around everyone’s schedule. Johnny’s going to do his film this winter, while we’ve agreed to keep Selene light during the season so she can go make her vanity biopic. But the trade-off is we have to do it closer to home, probably Vancouver. It simplifies things, especially now that Johnny’s new wife has decided she wants to live in Hawaii part of the year. Besides, the Maryland Film Commission’s budget was slashed. No more givebacks.”

“So everyone gets what they want, and Baltimore is left empty-handed?”

“Most of Baltimore. How many people live here? Six hundred thousand or so? Well, five hundred ninety thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine get bupkes. But if Lloyd settles down, earns his GED? Flip and I are committed to paying his way through school. USC, NYU, community college, a technical school if that’s what he wants — he gets in, we pay. And we’ll do whatever we can to find him work when he gets out.”

Tess was stunned — happily, for once. “That could be a lot of money, four years of college.”

“Yeah, it’s about what I make a month, since we negotiated our new deal.” The man who had once called her an asshole waited, clearly expecting Tess to say something cutting or sarcastic, but she was at a loss.

“Well… thanks. That’s huge.”

Ben seemed a little disappointed that rudeness had failed her for once. “The movie’s starting. We should go back to our seats.”

“It’s a television show.”

“Well, we call it the movie sometimes.”

“And actresses are actors. Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop.”

Before the screening of the pilot, Flip took the stage and made a little speech, thanking the crew and the city, hitting all the right self-deprecatory notes. Tess remembered him at Greer’s memorial service, how well he had spoken there, too. Yes, Flip had the knack of saying the right words in the right way, but did he ever mean any of them? Here he was, praising his father’s hometown to the skies, knowing that he wouldn’t be returning. He had gotten what he needed out of the city and was moving on. The people who were laughing appreciatively at his jokes and witticisms would have to find new gigs, perhaps move to other cities for work.

Flip returned to his seat to enthusiastic applause, and
Mann of Steel
began with a bright, peppy credit sequence that made Baltimore look like the Disney version of a working-class town. Tess watched, absorbed in spite of herself. It was actually pretty good. But as the show wore on, she couldn’t help noticing that something had changed.
She
had changed. Aware now of what happened behind the camera, she couldn’t stop breaking down the effects required by each scene. There was Mann in the union office, but all Tess could focus on was pudgy, vain Johnny Tampa and the view through the window, which she now knew to be translights, computer digitized images lighted for daytime. She watched Selene float into the frame, and she thought about how the camera must have rolled along a track to create that giddy, gliding sensation. She listened to the sounds of a modern port, knowing much of it had been overlaid later, in a studio. She saw the moon rise and wondered if that had been easier or more difficult to capture than a sunrise, or if some stupid local girl had blundered into that shot as well.

And then, just like that, it was over.

With the crew present, the credits were one of the indisputable highlights, applause and shouts greeting each name. Even Tess found herself applauding one small line of type —
based on a short story by Bob Grace
. With eight episodes this season and a pickup for next, that credit was better than an annuity for Marie Sybert, Bob’s heir. That had been Flip’s idea, but it hadn’t been done out of kindness, or even a belief that George Sybert had a legitimate claim. It was simply the cheapest way to buy Sybert’s silence, to end any embarrassing talk of theft and plagiarism. More important to Flip, it kept his father out of things. For the thing that bugged Flip the most, Ben had told Tess, was not the possibility that someone would think his idea was stolen, but that it had been offered to his father first.